Auto Suggestions are available once you type at least 3 letters. Use up arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+up arrow) and down arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+down arrow) to review and enter to select.

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kremlin Conspiracy comes this latest international thriller about a terrifying nuclear alliance among three world powersRussia, Iran, and North Koreaand the man who must halt their deadly strategy.Shot out of the air in enemy territory in the middle of the greatest international crisis since the end of the Cold War, former U.S. Secret Service agent Marcus Ryker finds himself facing an impossible task. Not only does he have to somehow elude detection and capture by Russian special forces, but he must convince his own government to grant safe harbor to the one man responsible for the global mayhemRussian double agent and assassin Oleg Kraskin. While frantically negotiating with his contacts in the White House, Marcus learns that the unstable North Korean regime plans to use the international chaos as a smokescreen to sell nuclear weapons to Iran. With the fate of the entire free world on the line, Marcus makes a deal with the U.S. governmenthe will go back to work as an international operative and track down the WMDs before they end up in the hands of those with the determination and the means to use them. Marcus and Oleg worked together once before to avert a world war. Can they now find a way to stop world destruction?

Product Details

About the Author

Joel C. Rosenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 novels—The Last Jihad, The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, The Copper Scroll, Dead Heat, The Twelfth Imam, The Tehran Initiative, Damascus Countdown, The Auschwitz Escape, The Third Target, The First Hostage, and Without Warning—and five works of nonfiction. Joel's titles have sold nearly 3 million copies. Visit www.joelrosenberg.com.

Read an Excerpt

Marcus Ryker hurtled through frigid darkness at terminal velocity as words from his childhood echoed through his head.

From the day he'd become a teenager, his mother had uttered these words to him more times than he could possibly remember. Every time he left for school. Every time he went out with friends. Every time he borrowed the car or hiked a fourteener or went white-water rafting. Marjorie Ryker knew her only son well. Marcus wasn't simply a kid who loved adventure and pushing all limits all the time. He was an adrenaline junkie, and she'd genuinely — and rightly — feared one misstep could prove catastrophic.

Now pushing forty, Marcus was free-falling through a thick band of cloud cover, somewhere over northwestern Russia. He could see nothing. Not the moon nor the stars. Not the twinkling lights of a single city or village or hamlet below. Nor could he hear a sound, save the steady hiss of the oxygen flowing into his helmet. He couldn't hear the air whipping past at 120 miles per hour. He couldn't even hear the scream of jet engines as six MiG fighters bore down on him from multiple angles at twice the speed of sound.

Only moments before, Marcus and his two colleagues had lunged out of the side of a Gulfstream IV at an altitude of eighteen thousand feet. Now they were quickly passing under ten thousand feet. But they had swerved far off their intended flight path before jumping. What actually lay below them now was anyone's guess.

To their left was the Gulf of Finland. Off to their right — far off, Marcus hoped — was Lake Ladoga. Were they to hit either body of water during the unseasonably early and intense blizzard engulfing the region, their fate would be sealed. They would freeze to death in minutes. Yet if his calculations were correct, they should more likely come down somewhere on a spit of land known as the Karelian Isthmus. That would still put them in Russian territory and thus in serious risk of being hunted down and found. Should that happen, he'd rather die than be arrested. But they could also land within striking distance of the Finnish border, giving them a shot at reaching safety.

In the early morning darkness, Marcus forced his mother's words from his thoughts and began mentally ticking through all the gear he'd asked the Agency to load onto the plane ahead of their escape. It would be all they'd have to keep them alive. There were a sniper rifle, an AK-47, and two pistols, all Russian-made. There was a box of ammunition, though certainly not enough to get them through more than limited contact with Russian forces. They had a handheld GPS unit and a satellite phone. They also had an all-weather tent, a hatchet, a hunting knife, ropes, three water bottles, a medical kit, matches, and —

A massive explosion erupted above them. The heat-seeking missiles had finally found their target. The dark sky was engulfed in a blinding fireball of searing orange and red. In moments, molten metal — remnants of the $40 million business jet — would begin raining down around them, and the icy earth was rushing up fast.

Plunging downward in a spread-eagle posture, Marcus wiped away the ice crystals forming on the altimeter strapped to his wrist. Six thousand feet. Five thousand feet. Four thousand. Three thousand. Had he been alone, he would have held out longer, until he was closer to the ground and far less likely to be spotted. But while Marcus had trained for HALO jumps during his stint in the Marines, the forty-six-year-old Russian at his side had not.

Oleg Kraskin — code-named the Raven — had served in the Red Army. He'd completed basic training but had gone on to work as a clerk in the office of military attorneys. He'd neither jumped out of a plane in his life nor imagined having to do so. Marcus had seen the terror in the man's eyes when he'd briefed him on the escape plan. But there was no other way. He needed the Raven alive, so the decision wasn't hard. Better they should pull their rip cords now than delay any further and risk a miscalculation that could prove fatal.

As they broke through the cloud cover around twenty-three hundred feet, Marcus spotted his Russian comrade thirty yards to his right and gave the signal that it was time.

There was no response.

Again Marcus signaled with a wave of his arms, but again Oleg neither acknowledged him nor opened his chute.

Something was wrong. Marcus had drilled into Oleg the few essential things he needed to remember to survive this jump. Why wasn't he responding?

Plunging beneath fifteen hundred feet, Marcus tried again to get the Russian's attention, to no avail. Now he had mere seconds to act. He could feel his heart rate spiking. A massive shot of adrenaline surged through his system. Pulling his arms to his sides and bringing his feet together, Marcus leaned right, cutting a path through the rushing wind and blowing snow. It was an awkward maneuver, made more so by the wounded woman slipping in and out of consciousness strapped to the front of his tandem jumpsuit, complicating his every move.

A moment later, Marcus slammed into Oleg's side. Still no response. The Raven had blacked out. Marcus forced himself to stay calm. Back in his earliest days in the Marines, during jump school at Parris Island, he had practiced helping a fellow diver in distress, though they'd never trained him to do so during a tandem jump. Marcus had no idea whether his canopy built for two could adequately slow the rate of descent for three jumpers without killing them all. But as he flipped on his night vision gear and got his bearings, he knew there was no other way.

They were coming down over land, not water. But below them were forests thick with snow-covered pines. Off to his left, Marcus could see a small clearing. He could steer to it if he deployed his own chute immediately. But if he pulled Oleg's rip cord first, he had no way to direct the Russian's descent. Oleg could easily get caught in trees sixty to eighty feet high, unreachable by Marcus from the ground. Or Oleg could simply become impaled on one of the soaring pines.

They were now passing below a thousand feet. Marcus maneuvered himself forward through the near-blinding snowfall, grabbed Oleg's harness with one gloved hand, and yanked the man toward him. Reaching into his vest with his other gloved hand, he drew out a carabiner and bound Oleg's harness to his own.

Eight hundred feet.

Seven hundred feet.

Now or never. Gripping Oleg with one hand as tightly as he could, Marcus pulled his own rip cord with the other. His chute instantly deployed. The metal fastener binding the two men held fast, so Marcus desperately tried to steer the three of them out of danger and toward the clearing he had spotted.

Editorial Reviews

01/14/2019

In bestseller Rosenberg’s solid sequel to 2018’s The Kremlin Conspiracy, Oleg Kraskin, a former corporate lawyer who’s now a senior aide to his father-in-law, President Aleksandr Ivanovich Luganov of the Russian Federation, has given former Secret Service agent Marcus Ryker highly classified information—the war plan for the imminent invasion of NATO nations Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Eager to prevent a war that’s sure to spread worldwide, Oleg decides he must take desperate measures to stop Luganov. Meanwhile, the Russians and the North Koreans, who have developed a ballistic missile that can reach America, sign a mutual defense pact. The North Koreans, who have pretended to give up their nuclear arsenal, are also secretly planning to sell missiles to Iran. Marcus joins Oleg in Russia, and the two of them end up going on the run with the Moscow CIA station chief, Jenny Morris. Their dash across Russia provides the book’s most exciting moments, but Rosenberg also handles multiple subplots well, the search for Iranian missiles among them. Shelve this average example of the genre right in the middle of similarly themed thrillers. (Mar.)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

What would happen if Russia, North Korea, and Iran formed an alliance?
Given our current geo-political climate, the timeliness of this book is unsettling and too plausible for comfort. I hope everyone that reads this book takes the threat set forth in the plot seriously. The Persian Gamble has overtaken a couple of Rosenberg’s other books as my new favorite. I stayed up until 1:00 a.m. to finish it because I didn’t want to put it down.
Marcus Ryker returns at the exact point he left us at the end of The Kremlin Conspiracy, the first book in this series, parachuting from a jetliner moments before it is shot down by the Russian military. With him is the Russian double agent turned assassin who is THE one man with all of the information and contacts to stop an attack on the US. There is plenty of action in the story as Ryker tries to get the Russian and himself safely out of Russia and to the US. The question is whether the US leaders believe his story that the threat of nuclear attack is both real and imminent? Or, will they label him as a traitor?
Personal, professional, and national loyalties are questioned and tested. Risks are taken, and the true cost of living in a free nation is shown us through the sacrifices of our nation’s military heroes. The story moves across Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. as secret alliances are revealed and Ryker risks everything to save his country.
If you did not read the first book in the series, The Kremlin Conspiracy, the author gives you enough information at the beginning of this book to understand the previous story. I hope to see more books in this series as Mr. Rosenberg has set up Marcus Ryker to be a protagonist whose own losses and struggles are interwoven through the story and look to become as interesting as the stories themselves.
Thank you to NetGalley and Tyndale House Publishers for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

auditor2

9 days ago

Former U.S. Secret Service agent Marcus Ryker finds himself facing an impossible task of not only somehow eluding detection and capture by Russian special forces, but he must convince his own government to grant safe harbor to the one man responsible for the global mayhem―Russian double agent and assassin Oleg Kraskin. While frantically negotiating with his contacts in the White House, Marcus learns that the unstable North Korean regime plans to use the international chaos as a smokescreen to sell nuclear weapons to Iran.
This book actually seemed more like two books in one to me. The first being the time the characters spent on the run in Russia and the second being the time spent in Eastern Asia. And for some reason it seemed a little disjointed. But still the whole book was very readable. There were a lot of characters to keep track of throughout the book both in the U. S. and throughout the world. But in dealing with governments, I realize that there are always a lot of people involved in the process. Still I found it hard at times to keep them all straight.
I always appreciate the way that the author presents the gospel in his books. I always encourage my friends to read his books since they are so relevant to what is happening in the world today. And they added benefit of having them read the gospel message is wonderful. And I always learn so much about geography when I look up the locations that he uses in his books. Since I am a traveler, I must look all of them up on a map. As to the ending, it was not the cliff hanger that many of his books have but I hope we will find out what happens to Marcus and Oleg going forward.
I highly recommend this book and look forward to purchasing it for our church library. I also thank Netgalley for the read. The above comments are my own.

Ellen-oceanside

9 days ago

THE PERSIAN GAMBLE..
...by .JOEL...ROSENBERG
A sequel to the Kremlin Conspiracy .A-retired Agent Marcus is called back to service. He teams up with a Russian assassin Oleg son in law to a Russian dictator, code name Raven. Now helping him to defect from Russia after he killed his father in law. Risking his life giving American information. Now with hazard conditions these two are running for their lives. A political thriller with many countries after them. It is a tight twisted plot to the end.
Given ARC for my voluntary review and my honest opinion. by Net Galley and Tyndale.